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known_ID writes "The Large Hadron Collider — the most puissant particle-punisher ever assembled by the human race — has suffered another major power failure, knocking not only the atom smasher itself but even its associated websites offline."

I'm not sure how much the LHC has actually ended up costing.
I don't know if it's possible to prove this time-travelling higgs theory without attempting to build several more LHC scale colliders.

But if it's true, the cost has/will have been worth it. Maybe it's not in the list of breakthrough discoveries we were hoping for, but wouldn't it be mind-bogglingly amazing anyway? I don't think pure science gets much better.

Yes, extremely high-energy collisions, of the order of 100 million TeV, have been directly observed. Such events involve particles eight orders of magnitude more energetic than any produced by the LHC at its maximum design potential. The first such ultra-high energy event was observed at a cosmic ray observatory at New Mexico in 1962, and there have been a few since, but they are understandably rare. More information here. [wikipedia.org] So no, I don't think there is any other explanation why the LHC appears to be getting hit by so many problems other than the fact that it is among the most complex devices ever built by humankind. Natural processes already make particles with vastly higher energies than the LHC could even dream of reaching, so if a planet-destroying event was possible at the levels of energy it can achieve, then we wouldn't be here to build the LHC to begin with.